For once, something positive about Israel has been served up by The New York Times, albeit unintentionally. What’s more, Al Jazeera spoke the truth.
Moshiach’s arrival seems imminent.
The Gray Lady’s inadvertent compliment took the form of a nearly 5,000-word front page article titled: “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians.” While the report tried hard to emphasize the last four words of that headline, the real upshot of the piece lay in what the first four implied: that Israel has tight rules of war that are only loosened somewhat in critical cases, like the fight against a bloodthirsty enemy today.
At the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, Belén Fernández (the author of a book titled Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World) groused that, as her column’s title put it: “NYT ‘investigates’ genocide, uncovers nothing but ‘loosened standards.’”
The reason The Times piece raised the columnist’s hackles was that it took a pass on the opportunity to spread the lie that Israel aims to kill Gazan civilians. She lamented: “The word ‘genocide’ appears exactly once in the article—and only as an allegation that Israel denies.”
Those dirty Zionists at The Times.
What The Times article that so exercised Ms. Fernández reported was that, while in previous conflicts with Hamas, “many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt’ and “officers could risk killing [only] up to five civilians,” after the Hamas barbarism of October 7, 2023, “the military leadership changed its rules of engagement because it believed that Israel faced an existential threat.” Officers could now “endanger up to 20 people in each airstrike” and “pursue not only the senior Hamas commanders, arms depots and rocket launchers…but also the lowest-ranking fighters.”
What’s more, “From the first day of the war,” The Times revealed, “Israel significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks, or warning shots that give civilians time to flee an imminent attack.”
If that sounds terribly draconian to you, you might have a future at Al Jazeera. But you would also be utterly ignorant about the nature of war, and utterly oblivious to the singular efforts Israel has made in the past (and, in a somewhat modified degree, makes in the present) to protect those assumed to be innocents.
The Israeli military, The Times article noted, “acknowledged that its rules of engagement had changed after October 7, but said…that its forces have consistently been employing means and methods that adhere to the rules of law.” The IDF also explained that the scale of Hamas’ attack, the fact that terrorists purposely hide among civilians and the murderous group’s extensive tunnel network created unusual challenges and required revisions to past protocols.
Considering the tragic but inevitable toll on civilians that attends all wars, it sounds about right to me.
The Times piece also noted, toward its very end, that the IDF has “steadily used fewer munitions over the past 12 months” and has “also tightened its rules of engagement,” decreeing that officers now need “special permission for nearly all… deadly strikes, except for those targeting the most senior Hamas commanders.”
So, while the grumpy Gray Lady labors to portray Israel as insufficiently concerned with civilian casualties in Gaza, reading between the lines of her attempted hit piece (or, for that matter, just reading its lines) presents the opposite picture.
And it’s a picture that has been painted by objective, knowledgeable people—like John Spencer, a leading international expert on urban warfare, who contends that “The way the IDF protects innocent civilians while minimizing the number of escaping terrorists demonstrates a significant improvement in reducing harm to civilians while simultaneously targeting and apprehending Hamas members.”
Or Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British military forces in Afghanistan, who wrote that “In my experience of observing the IDF in action, they scrupulously stick to the laws of war in their targeting policies and actions.”
It’s gratifying to read a New York Times piece offering positive information that undermines the negative impression it wants to give, and to see Al Jazeera whining about that fact.
Might the former one day unapologetically praise Israel, or the latter abandon its myopic animus? Maybe when Moshiach arrives, may that be soon.
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